In the presence of her courtiers, the Queen treated the amiable Major just as she did his brisk predecessor. “I couldn’t pin down a difference between the two,” said one of her senior advisers. Major was “totally relaxed and cheerful” before his audiences. “Afterward when he was with the private secretaries, the conversation was almost always about cricket.”
Shortly after assuming power, the new prime minister led Britain into a coalition with the United States and thirty other nations to free Kuwait from Iraqi forces that had invaded the previous August. Britain was a key player in the successful air bombardment of Iraq that began on January 17, 1991, followed by a ground campaign that swept to victory on February 28. Major gave the Queen regular briefings, and as the ground assault began on Sunday the 24th, she made the first wartime broadcast of her reign, reassuring the nation that she was praying for victory.
A cease-fire ended the occupation of Kuwait, although it did not remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power. Still, the war was hailed as a significant success for Major as well as for Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush. The two leaders bonded tightly as allies and “had a lot in common,” wrote Ray Seitz, Bush’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.
Three months later, Bush welcomed the Queen to Washington for her third state visit. The patrician Bushes and royal Windsors established an easy camaraderie from the start. As near contemporaries, the forty-first president and the Duke of Edinburgh had both seen action in the Pacific during World War II. The two families shared similar Anglo-Saxon traditions and values, and they counted the Queen’s hosts in Kentucky, Will and Sarah Farish, as good friends. “The Queen is rather formal,” Bush recalled. “But I never found her reserve stand-offish. It’s hard to explain really, but she is very, very easy to be with. Conversation comes easily.”
Elizabeth II’s arrival in Washington on Tuesday, May 14, came when gratitude for Britain’s assistance in the Gulf War was running high. Bush rolled out an imposing welcome on the South Lawn with military bands, fife and drum corps, and twenty-one-gun salute fired by howitzers on the Ellipse. But after his effusive remarks welcoming her as “freedom’s friend,” neither he nor his aides remembered to pull out a step for the five-foot-four-inch Queen to use behind the podium intended for the six-foot-two-inch president. As she made her reply, the cluster of microphones covered most of her face, and television viewers could glimpse only her eyeglasses beneath a broad- brimmed purple and white striped hat.
At a small luncheon in the private quarters of the White House with Bush family members, the British and American ambassadors, and the Farishes, “we had a good laugh” about the hat incident, recalled Bush. “Her humor made it all seem fine.” It was also the first time the sixty-five-year-old Queen met the president’s eldest son, forty- four-year-old George W. Bush, the future forty-third president, who was then running the Texas Rangers baseball team. “The first thing I noticed was the twinkle in her eye, which I took as a sign of an easy spirit,” he recalled. “Much to my delight, she certainly didn’t give off the vibe that ‘I’m better than you.’ ”
He told Elizabeth II that his cowboy boots were custom-made and usually were printed with “Texas Rangers.” “Is that on those boots?” she inquired. “No, Ma’am,” young Bush joked. “God Save the Queen.” She was most amused and impishly asked, “Are you the black sheep in the family?” “I guess so,” he said. “All families have them,” the Queen replied helpfully. “Who’s yours?” asked Bush. “Don’t answer that!” interjected his mother. The Queen took the first lady’s cue and escaped the conversation gracefully.
After lunch the president escorted the Queen onto the Truman Balcony to show her the view of the Tidal Basin and Jefferson Memorial. The White House was being repainted, and twenty layers had been stripped off the facade, laying bare pale stone and raw wood. Visible on a nearby pilaster were scorch marks dating from 1814 when British troops had set fire to the presidential mansion. “I teased her that it was her folks who had done this,” the president recalled. “We talked about the fact that the burn marks were ‘enshrined.’ ”
That night at a state dinner for 130 the president kept up the jocular tone by complimenting the Queen on her intrepid walking, which “left even the Secret Service panting.… I’m glad my fibrillating heart was not taxed by a competitive walk.” The essence of their toasts reaffirmed the Anglo-American friendship recently strengthened by a wartime alliance. “No wonder I cannot feel a stranger here,” said the Queen. “The British have never felt America to be a foreign land.” She praised Bush for his conduct of the Gulf War “not with bombast and rhetoric but thoroughness and courage.”
The Queen jammed eighteen engagements into her three days in the nation’s capital, including the first address by a British monarch to a joint session of Congress. She opened her remarks by saying, “I do hope you can see me today from where you are,” prompting a burst of laughter and standing ovation. She also watched her first Major League Baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and Oakland Athletics. As with her other events, she had studied briefing papers on America’s national pastime. After greeting gum-chewing players lined up in the dugout, she received a full tutorial from Bush, a former varsity first baseman at Yale, as they sat together in the owner’s box.
The most diverting moment of her visit occurred in one of the city’s downtrodden neighborhoods, where Elizabeth II visited a 210-pound African American great-grandmother, sixty-seven-year-old Alice Frazier. The purpose was to see Frazier’s newly built home, which she had purchased under a private-public program for low- income first-time owners. As the Queen entered the house, Frazier vigorously shook her hand, said, “How are you doin’?,” then wrapped her arms around her guest and gave her an exuberant bear hug. Elizabeth II smiled gamely over Frazier’s shoulder as she stiffly leaned forward, arms held tightly at her waist until she was released. “It’s the American way,” Frazier said afterward. “I couldn’t stop myself.”
For their brief moments of respite, Elizabeth II and Philip retired to their five-room, two-bath suite in Blair House. They took their breakfast in the upstairs library, served by their page, but otherwise the Queen remained in her quarters while Philip busied himself by turning off lights, muttering, “What a waste, what a waste.” One morning Benedicte Valentiner, the Blair House general manager, was standing in the front hallway when the Queen came downstairs before her first engagement. “She was standing stock still,” Valentiner recalled. “It was as if she were looking inward, getting set. I admired that enormously. This was how she wound up her batteries. There was no chit chat, but standing absolutely still and waiting, resting in herself. It was a remarkable coping mechanism.”
On Friday the Queen and her nearly fifty-strong entourage plus four and a half tons of luggage—hers always marked with yellow labels imprinted “The Queen”—left on a chartered British Airways Concorde for official visits to six U.S. cities and another three-day vacation in Kentucky. They landed in Miami and spent ten hours touring the city before boarding
It was a particularly welcome reunion with the Reagans, who remained affectionate friends of Elizabeth II and Philip. Just a year earlier, Ronald Reagan had heard about the death of Burmese and had written the Queen a letter of condolence. Her grateful two-page reply reported that while walking her dogs she had last seen the twenty-eight-year-old mare “grazing happily” in her field at Windsor. The next morning, Burmese had died of a heart attack after “a long life for a horse.”
Elizabeth II was in high spirits on
After a quiet weekend on
